autobiography
Americannoun
-
autobiographies
plural
noun
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of autobiography
Explanation
You are writing an autobiography when you write your own life story. A writer who writes an autobiography is like a painter who paints a self-portrait. If you intend to write your autobiography one day, it might be a good idea to start recording notes about your life in a diary. The author Gertrude Stein was being clever when she poked fun at the very idea of autobiography when she wrote her own memoirs but titled them The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, instead of The Autobiography of Gertrude Stein.
Vocabulary lists containing autobiography
Words to Live By: Bio
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Write On!: Graph and Gram
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To Thine Own Self Be True: Auto
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Still, she looms large in Lowen’s imagination, especially when she finds a secret autobiography in which Verity reveals her darkest secrets.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 1, 2026
As Emma Raducanu plots a route back to the pinnacle of tennis, the Briton has been taking inspiration from Andre Agassi's 2009 autobiography.
From BBC ● Sep. 23, 2026
To gain more agency, for example, you can tend the garden for an hour or write your autobiography.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 18, 2026
Elsewhere, Mr. Tommasini quotes the same remark from Anderson’s autobiography in two different chapters, a lapse better editing should have caught.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 18, 2026
Alex Haley and I had discussed the possibility of my writing his autobiography to acknowledge our literary circle, our family of writers—my father to him and him to me.
From "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" by Alex Malcolm X;Hailey
The book’s leading actors have been subjects of biographies and autobiographies, and most events have been exhaustively covered in scholarly and popular histories and articles as well as media reports.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 16, 2025
“The projections mirror and amplify that as part of the visual vocabulary, whether that’s Douglass’ newspaper articles or autobiographies, or the text of the Emancipation Proclamation.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 16, 2025
Chapter 9 is about Frederick Douglass and identity-aware liberalism, as expressed through his autobiographies.
From Salon ● Nov. 10, 2024
Considering Angelou’s autobiographies — particularly, “Gather Together in My Name” — you can see why Myron Goble’s script about the power of family appealed to her.
From New York Times ● Dec. 26, 2023
Pamphlets of verse by negro poets, autobiographies of colored orators.
From "The Underground Railroad: A Novel" by Colson Whitehead
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
